For Warren, Bad Blood Over Ethnic Claims

Karen Geronimo, a member of the Mescalero Apache tribe in town for the Democratic convention, knows what she wants from Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate from Massachusetts: a blood sample.

“Someone needs to make her take a DNA test,” said Ms. Geronimo, whose husband, Harlyn Geronimo, is the great-grandson of the legendary warrior Geronimo.

The still-simmering controversy over Ms. Warren’s self-proclaimed American Indian heritage has chased her from the campaign trail in Massachusetts to the convention hall, resonating with a small but vocal constituency: American Indian Democrats.

During her academic career, Ms. Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, identified herself as a minority, citing her one thirty-second Cherokee blood, a fact that Republicans pounced on to try to portray her as an opportunist and a fraud. The line on her résumé does not seem to set well with some Indian members of her own party.

“If you’re going to be Native, don’t just be Native on paper,” said Lexie LaMere, a Nebraska delegate and member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. “What’s troubling is that she’s shown nothing in her history of being involved in Native American issues.”

Mr. Geronimo, wearing a “Native Americans for Obama” button, said he was disappointed when he first heard of Ms. Warren’s claim.

Photo

Kerry Kennedy called Mitt Romney “just out of touch with people who are struggling.”Credit
Reuters

“She needed leverage to further her career and started digging,” he said. Ms. Warren brushed aside reporters who asked about the concerns on Wednesday, saying: “I’ve answered those questions. I’m here to talk about what’s happening to America’s working-class families. That’s my job. It’s my full-time job.”

Still, she may want to avoid bumping into Indians around the hall. Jim La Pointe, the great-grandnephew of Crazy Horse and a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, had a test in mind for Ms. Warren.

“I’d like to hear her speak her native language,” he said with a sly smile.

Everywhere,

Kennedy Cousins

Kerry Kennedy, the seventh child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, could not provide a precise head count of Kennedy cousins who have flooded into Charlotte. “It’s not as many as the last convention,” she said.

But suffice it to say, in the first party gathering since the death three summers ago of her uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the family is here in force.

Caroline Kennedy is speaking to the convention on Thursday, two nights after her cousin Joseph P. Kennedy III, a candidate for Congress in Massachusetts, introduced a video tribute to the senator.

The senator’s son Patrick, a former congressman from Rhode Island who has acknowledged a drug addiction, held a counseling session for fellow conventiongoers (the “Recovery Caucus”) while his brother, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., mused about running for elected office someday.

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The “Desperate Housewives” actress Eva Longoria is a co-chairwoman of the Obama re-election campaign.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

But back to Kerry Kennedy. She has not had a peaceful summer. Her close friend Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., committed suicide in May. Two months later, Ms. Kennedy, below, struck a tractor-trailer while driving erratically in Westchester County, apparently under the influence of Ambien.

Rumblings that her ex-husband, Andrew M. Cuomo, will run for president may bring fresh scrutiny to their marriage.

On Wednesday, she presided over a screening of a documentary about her mother, Ethel, and then, in an interview, let loose about Mitt Romney, her uncle’s opponent from 18 years ago.

She described the Republican nominee as “just out of touch with people who are struggling.”

Ms. Kennedy said she feared that under Mr. Romney, America’s image abroad would suffer, likening it to the era of George W. Bush, when the United States “was the most suspected and hated country on earth.” She then slammed the Republican convention as lacking diversity.

“It was,” she said, “almost the last gasp of the dominance of white America.”

...The lockdown of the Time Warner Cable Arena around 9 p.m. set off a rather unattractive rush of name-dropping and gate-crashing by the delegates and V.I.P.’s stuck outside. “You have to let him in. He’s running for Congress,” one crowd member yelled, unpersuasively. True celebrity prevailed, as it usually does. The former Obama body man Reggie Love was recognized and let inside, while will.i.am simply slipped past the barricades.

...Robert E. Rubin, Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, falling into the indoor pool at a party for Democratic bigs at the Ritz-Carlton hosted by the hedge fund manager Orin Kramer, Mr. Love and Hamilton E. James of the Blackstone Group. Mr. Rubin said he didn’t see the narrow ledge in front of the water as he walked into the room. “It was kind of funny,” Mr. Rubin said good-naturedly as he stood in the Ritz lobby a few hours later, in a dry change of clothes. One guest said he was “waist-deep” in the pool. Tom Brokaw, who was in the room, joked that he could now blackmail Mr. Rubin. “I own him,” he teased. Mr. Rubin was charmingly philosophical. “It’s a great way to get attention,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: For Warren, Bad Blood Over Ethnic Claims. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe